I initially wanted to do a decent article on this, but I’m not sure if this would be the best place for it. I just read the original article as a funny bit of owl news, but as I read related articles, it touches on things from the French revolution to current legal cases and conspiracies.
I’ll share a bit of the things that I’ve read, the links I have if you want to read more, and if there’s decent interest, I could do more.
This is the original Guardian article that caught my interest while I was doing my weekly check for Owl News. Here’s the first bit:
At 3.30am on the night of 23 April 1993, at a secret location somewhere in France, a man struggled in pitch-blackness to dig a hole in which to bury something stowed in his car boot. “I hadn’t even finished, and my hands were bloody,” he later told Libération. “When it was done, I went far away, to get breakfast. I looked at myself in the mirror at the cafe. I was barely recognisable, dishevelled, covered in earth.”
The man, who became known to thousands of French people as Max Valentin, had hidden a small bronze owl sculpture, instigating what would become one of the world’s longest treasure hunts. The site’s location could be divined by solving 11 riddles – a combination of fiendish linguistic games, cartographical ciphers, historical allusions and mathematical brainteasers – published in a book, On the Trail of the Golden Owl, that sent amateur treasure hunters poring over maps and scouring obscure villages with metal detectors. Whoever unearthed the owl would win an identical sculpture, made of gold, silver, rubies and diamonds, and worth 1m francs (about €150,000, or £126,000, in today’s money). But, with a puzzle-setter’s precision, Valentin died exactly 16 years later, on the night of 23 April 2009, with the owl still undiscovered. It’s still out there now.
But the hunt has led some to places of disillusionment, and worse. A few searchers began to doubt that the byzantine riddles had any definitive solution. One believed the prize was booby-trapped, and that Valentin was trying to kill him. Generally, the late gamemaster is revered, but Becker is a more contentious figure for some chouetteurs – especially after he tried auctioning the original gold sculpture in 2014, saying the game was null and void following Valentin’s death (the sale was eventually cancelled).
The prize, worth about a quarter of a million dollars:
I’ll put more articles and links in the comments.
This is SO fascinating! Thank you for making me aware of this!
Oh thank you! I expected this to not get much traction here, but I think the whole story is fascinating and would make a great mini series! All the stuff about contract law I thought was very interesting and how the artist is now essentially cursed by this statue.
I’m not a conspiracy person so I’m not going to read the clues… I don’t want to get sucked in! It would be cool to see this solved someday though.
The artist made the owl statue supposedly due to his relation to the Chouan brothers, who fight against the French Revolution.
Chouan coat of arms depicting owls.
Chouan is a French nickname meaning “owl” or “the silent one,” though the Wikipedia entry has some other sorted origins of the name.
If you want to know about their role in the counter revolution, this is the Wikipedia entry for their revolt, the Chouannerie.
(French readers, please correct me if I’m wrong or incomplete on anything!)
Chouette chouette!
Yes, I liked where they called themselves chouetteuers and chouettesses or whatever it was! ☺️
Twenty-five years later, where is the mysterious hunt for the “golden owl”
Since 1993, a still unsolved treasure hunt has obsessed several thousand puzzle lovers in France. Legal disputes, clan struggles and unsuccessful expeditions continue to animate a community that is still very active.
On the night of April 23 to 24, 1993, a man who called himself Max Valentin buried a box containing a bronze owl, somewhere in France. Or ? This is the question that has tormented the “chouetteurs” and “chouetteuses”, the participants in this always unresolved treasure hunt, for twenty-five years. At the end: one million francs, the estimate at the time of the owl made of gold, silver and studded with rubies and diamonds measuring 50 centimeters wide, the real price to be claimed once its replica was found . In a quarter of a century, no one has found the solution to the eleven riddles in the book On the Trail of the Golden Owl , the first edition of which was published on May 15, 1993. This makes it the longest treasure hunt yet underway around the world.
Who are the creators of the game?
The mastermind of the affair was Max Valentin, whose real name was Régis Hauser. Marketing consultant, professional in the communications sector, author (among others) of Designing and writing effective mailings, he imagined the treasure hunt at the end of the 70s. It was during a conversation with the artist Michel Becker more than ten years later, he finally decided to launch this treasure hunt. Valentin will be the only one to know the location of the prize; Becker is responsible for designing the treasure: a descendant of Chouans, he opts for their symbol, the owl.
After the launch of the book, published in 50,000 copies, a Minitel server was set up. Max Valentin responded in person to thousands of questions from “owlers”, until the service closed in 2001, multiplying new avenues for owl enthusiasts to explore. Over the years, the co-creator of the game acquired an almost mythical aura among the participants in the treasure hunt. He will organize other treasure hunts in the 2000s, some inspired by geocaching (but without using GPS data), others more traditional, with real winners at the end. On the night of April 23 to 24, sixteen years to the day after burying the replica of the bird, Max Valentin-Régis Hauser died, without knowing the result of a hunt that he only saw lasting two years at the time. base.
What are the clues?
“Wherever you want, by the horse and the coachman. But where you must, by compass and foot.” Or even “there is no one worse blind than he who does not want to see”. Now accessible on the Internet , the eleven puzzles of On the Trail of the Golden Owl combine texts, figures and illustrations. Once the puzzles were deciphered, however, there would remain a twelfth, a “super trick” bringing together all the others, as Max Valentin once declared .
Who are the “owls”?
In September 1993, Florence Aubenas followed these treasure seekers on their expeditions across France for Libération . “Men with owl heads”, available for reading at the end of this article, was the first in a long series of articles devoted to “owls” in the national media, often with the same plot: enthusiasts who seek , who think they know, but who cannot find it. Mickey, a civil servant who went on an adventure for his first expedition in Florence Aubenas’ article, is still on the trail of the golden owl. For him, the solution to this twelfth enigma lies in the small village of Dabo, in Moselle. “I dropped out after four or five years of research, and I started again recently,” he explains. By pulling out the maps and using new technologies that were not available in 1993, I discovered a new “plausible” location in the Dabo area. I’m exploring this avenue now.” We remain far from the frenzy of the beginnings when expeditions were weekly, each hunter fearing at the time that the owl would be dug up the following weekend.
There would have been 200,000 of them over the years who were passionate about this always insoluble treasure hunt. Today, the Association of Golden Owl Researchers (A2CO) claims 165 members, but its president, Gérard Simon, indicates that there are many more “owlers” still active, as evidenced by the five to ten daily downloads of the puzzle book on their site. The community formed by the A2CO still meets during annual ChouetteFêtes – the next one will take place from May 11 to 13 in Rocamadour (Lot).
Where are we, twenty-five years later?
Will the solution to the endless hunt for the golden owl be revealed in a court of law? In recent years, the treasure hunt has in any case experienced many adventures, but in the legal field. In 2009, the real statuette was returned to the organizers after the liquidation of the publishing house which published the book of puzzles. This information appeals to the “owlers”, only the organizers being aware that the statuette had been seized for several years. If a winner had presented himself like this, how could he have recovered it? Max Valentin died three months after this restitution, and ultimately there was only one way left to find out the outcome of the affair. An envelope containing the solution would exist, and it is the heirs of Max Valentin, not really involved in the hunt, who would be in its possession.
In June 2014, a new twist: the “chouetteurs” realized that the famous statuette was being put up for auction in Drouot by its creator, Michel Becker. “On a whim” , so as not to leave this responsibility to his children, he said in recent days in Le Matin . For him, the game has been over since the death of Max Valentin: he believes that the integrity of the hunt is no longer assured because there is no proof that the countermark is still buried. The sale was, however, canceled at the last minute: as the golden owl was still supposed to be in play, the potential buyer would have been obliged to exchange it for its bronze replica if a winner had come forward. In the process, the A2CO took Michel Becker to court, believing that the owl with outstretched wings should end up in the hands of a bailiff and not the artist. The association and Becker are still at odds: the “cool guys” have not forgiven him for putting the lot up for sale. In January 2017, the Paris Court of Appeal confirmed the 2009 ruling of the Versailles Court of Appeal: Michel Becker still owns the work, until someone comes forward with his replica. She does not consider it necessary in the current state of affairs for this work to be entrusted to the custody of a bailiff. (1)
Today, a certain vagueness still reigns: could the owl have been dug up by an individual who did not declare himself the winner? Could the cache have been covered by a parking lot or any other construction over the past twenty-five years? Or, worse, could the golden owl never have been buried? The A2CO and Michel Becker place complete confidence in Max Valentin’s abilities to find a suitable hiding place. The artist, however, believes that one theory remains plausible, without believing in it personally: Max Valentin could have dug up the replica when the original was seized, in order to preserve the hunt. And he would not have had time to put it back in place, the liquidation procedure ending a few months before his death.
Becker therefore proposes to create an association, in agreement with the researchers. This could appoint a bailiff who would be responsible for verifying that the treasure is still in the place mentioned in the envelope. History of relaunching the game within a real legal framework. For Gérard Simon of A2CO, the idea of someone going to check on site and digging up the owl represents a “big risk of alienating the game” . Many “owlers” want to keep the climax of this hunt completely intact: the exhumation of the owl, being the first on the scene, from the master of the game who will have obsessed them for years.
Yvon Crolet has lost his faith. “Owl” for twenty years, retired legal expert, ostracized from other hunting communities, he filed a complaint for organized gang fraud on the day of the 25th anniversary of the burying of the owl, April 23. A complaint which targets both the beneficiaries of Max Valentin, Michel Becker and the A2CO. In particular, he requests more than 60,000 euros in compensation and the revelation of the name of the winner. According to him, the purchase of the puzzle book constitutes a contract between the participants and the organizers. He would have the solution: the twelfth riddle would designate a place near Lus-la-Croix-Haute in the Vercors. But his shoveling revealed nothing. “For four years, I have asked in particular that the letters with the solutions sent by the players since 1993, who must sleep in a storage unit today, be opened to reveal a winner,” he says. Yvon Crolet would like to point out that above all he wants the solution to the puzzle, not necessarily the precious statuette. He even developed a certain aversion to the owl after twenty years of fruitless research: “Even if someone gave it to me, I wouldn’t want it! If I ever get the golden owl back, I think I’ll do a Caesar squeeze.”
Forgive the rough formatting, this is an older French news article ran through Google Translate.
It discusses the lawsuits and the anger of the artist being burdened with all of this after the death is the guy who started the whole thing.
I found it very intriguing.
The official treasure hunter website. They hold an annual convention. You can browse their proposed theories and solutions.
